A backlink is simply a link from a third-party website to your website. Generally, the more links, the better, but that has to be qualified by the quality of those links. This article will look into backlinks and guide you on what makes a quality link.
From a search engine’s perspective, backlinks serve as signals that:
- Your content is valuable - you don't get good links to poor content in the most part.
- Your site is trustworthy - your site must have a good design and look like it can be trusted to gain good links.
Your site is relevant to certain topics or industries. Relevant links are worth more than ones that aren't. If you have a site about knitting, a link from a dog site would NOT be as beneficial as a link from another trusted and quality knitting site.
Craft CMS and backlinks
As we have complete control over the content on our sites with Craft, our pages and content should and our sites should have great performance. There are no excuses for our content looking poor and our sites performing poorly in terms of performance. This should help our sites attract links, but Craft doesn't affect the power of any backlinks pointing towards us. Craft is more of a content and technical part of SEO.
The difference in ranking against a competitor
Let's say your competition has similar content and optimisation to you, but if you have many high-quality links pointing towards your site and they don't, all other things being equal, you will rank higher. I’ve seen sites with poor content and poor on-page SEO and still rank high due to there being many quality links pointing to their site. Even a few very high-quality links from trusted sources can catapult your page and site up the search rankings. Sure, you want good content and good technical SEO, but backlinks are very powerful.
Google constantly experiments, and here's what they found with no links.
Google is constantly (and I mean constantly) tweaking and testing. It’s not unheard of for them to make multiple changes to their algorithm in a single day. They conducted an experiment in which they devalued backlinks in their search rankings and found that the quality of search results was vastly inferior. Google uses backlinks as a strong factor because they improve search results enormously.
Crawling
With a good backlink profile for your site, you are giving Google all the right signals to say you are a quality offering. Google will reward you with more frequent crawling. Google wants exceptional content, and if you give that to them. You will get quality backlinks, and these backlinks will signal to the search engines to promote your content and get it on Google quickly. More crawling on your site means Google will get their content in the search index quicker, and it will show on Google listings quicker than a site with a poorer backlink profile.
John Muller, a Google search employee and front man for Google, said in a Search Engine Journal article that 1 good backlink can be worth millions of poor quality ones. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-john-mueller-total-number-of-backlinks-doesnt-matter/396638/
That’s from Google’s own mouth, which tells you everything you need to know about the quality of certain backlinks when comparing them against each other.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. It helps search engines understand what the linked page is about. My main advice for anchor text is to keep it natural.
In the body of content
Much like internal links, links placed naturally within the main body of content tend to carry more weight than links in footers, sidebars, or author bios. You really want these editorial links more than anything. These links are incredibly valuable compared to footer links, which have vastly diminished power compared to those in the body of the main content of the page.
Super power tip:
Try to get backlinks from content higher up the page than lower down the page.
Nofollow links
NoFollow links are links that the author of the website says to Google, “Don't trust this link.” Technically it looks like Anchor Text. This was introduced due to spam. For the maximum benefit of the link, you do NOT want a link with a nofollow attribute pointing towards your site. You want a natural link with no nofollow on it. There is some evidence recently that suggests nofollow links do provide benefit, but those would be edge cases. A link with a nofollow marginally better than no link, but you want links without any nofollow attribute on them. You can easily see nofollow in the HTML of the page linking to you.
Link disavow tool
There is a tool that gets talked about a lot in SEO circles called the link disavow tool, which you can see within Google Search Console. It can tell Google to discount links pointing towards your site. My advice is do NOT touch it unless you are an absolute expert and know what you are doing with it. In 99.9% of situations, it is not required.
First link counts more.
When a site links to you with a single link, that’s the most beneficial link. Let’s say you have the hypothetical situation where you have the option of getting 5 links from the same website and 5 links each from a different site. I would choose the 5 different links from 5 different sites every time. It’s the first link pointing to you that carries the most weight. Sure, additional links from the same site can help, but it's another case of diminishing returns.
PBNs
Private Blog Networks (PBNs) are a vast array of websites created solely for manipulating Google rankings. They really are just blog websites linked together, but their main job is to create links to deceive Google. Google is very smart, and PBNs have been busted big time in the last few years. Sure, it's still possible to get some use out of them, but it’s just not worth the hassle and risk of your site getting penalised. My advice is not to use PBNs, create exceptional content and build good relationships.
3 great rules for links - Ask yourself these 3 questions
- If Google didn't exist, would you still want that link?
- Is it a good link for the user?
- Will you get traffic from that link?
You want links from high-quality sources, and high-quality sources, in the most part, will have good traffic coming from them. Google has moved its algorithm towards what is the best user experience for the person using search.
These questions will get you a long way in deciding whether to go after links or not.
Written by John Macpherson